Normally it is not a good thing to look a gift horse in the mouth. But when you get enough of them handed to you, they start eating you out of house and home. That is the situation I found myself in when I stated playing Medieval Total War II.
The people responsible for these white elephants is a shadowy organization known as the council of nobles. These unnamed dudes tell me what they want me to do and reward me for doing it. The problem is, they have a nasty habit of telling me to do what I want to do anyway and they reward me quite generously.
For example, they gave me three units of heavy cavalry for taking Wales. Similar largess followed just about every city that I took. They even rewarded me for re-taking cities that the French took from me. These rewards were not always heavy cavalry. Sometimes they were crap infantry units or cash. Still, they gave me enough heavy cavalry to bankrupt my fledgling economy and they did not give me enough infantry build a balanced army.
Now if I had understood how the game worked right from the get go, I would have had half the world conquered by now. But since I did not realize that there was no real penalty for sacking cities, I found myself in a fiscal hole that prevented me from becoming as powerful as I should have been given all this largess. The bad effects of my lack of understanding lingered on after I had finally figured things out.
Mostly because all my governors got corrupted in the process.